


Through the Iron Gates of Life

by Balder12



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Bad Sex, Brief Gore, Drinking, Kevin Lives, M/M, Past Sam/Amelia, Post-Episode: s09e23 Do You Believe In Miracles?, minor character Castiel, minor character Dean Winchester, minor character Linda Tran, past Sam/Jess - Freeform, past Sam/Lucifer, references to past noncon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-29
Updated: 2014-12-29
Packaged: 2018-03-04 02:06:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2905322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Balder12/pseuds/Balder12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kevin is resurrected in the wake of 9.23, and helps Sam in his search for Dean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through the Iron Gates of Life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [De_Nugis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/gifts).



> Written for De_Nugis as part of the spn_j2_xmas gift exchange. Her prompt was: "Sam/Kevin, post-s9. Sam’s had his body and self used and split six ways from Sunday. Kevin has his own share of trauma and history of being screwed over by the universe in general and Winchesters in particular plus, you know, he’s a ghost. So you can see how the sex and/or relationship things between them could get difficult." Aside from the ghost part, this is almost certainly a better summary of the fic than the one I came up with.
> 
> Many thanks to my beta, [the_diggler](http://archiveofourown.org/users/the_diggler/pseuds/the_diggler), who had to put up with my incredible lateness and last-minute panic, and still did a great job.

**I.**

Dean’s body has been missing less than a day when there’s a knock on the front door of the bunker.  Sam’s hunched over the enigmatic note he’d found on the bed where his brother should be— _Sammy let me go_ —staring at it blankly and waiting for it to resolve itself into a message that makes sense.  He jerks to attention when he hears the sound, and for an instant he thinks it must be recorded, a television he’d forgotten about or a clock radio that had switched itself on automatically.  Only two people know the bunker exists:  Charlie’s in Oz and Cas has never knocked on a door in his life.      

The knocking is impossible and yet it goes on, constant and aggressive, like he’s getting rousted by the cops at 3am.  Sam peers at the space in front of the entryway through a cleverly hidden periscope installed by the Men of Letters.  A naked man is pounding both fists against the iron door.  He’s not Dean.  Of course he’s not, because Dean’s _dead_.  Sam felt the skin cooling beneath his fingers when he laid the body out on the bed.  But there’s still a stupid flicker of hope in his chest so brief that he only recognizes it when it’s extinguished. 

The man’s filthy, whoever he is, blackened from head to toe.  His arrival in the wake of Dean’s disappearance, his inexplicable knowledge of the bunker’s location, it’s all too strange to be a coincidence.  Sam’s dragging out iron chains and holy water to haul the man in for interrogation when he shouts, “I know you’re in there!  Let me in, you bastards, before I get arrested!”

Sam winces.  It’s using Kevin’s voice.  He throws open the door and pins the creature to the wall, demon knife against its throat, in one fluid motion.  It looks up at Sam with Kevin’s eyes, wide and scared.  He remembers watching them burn.  Even by the low standards he has come to expect from the universe this is cruel.    

“What are you?” Sam says, forcing his voice to sound commanding instead of hysterical.  He’s holding a knife to the throat of a friend he already murdered.  He feels like he might throw up.  He swallows bile and adds, “Where’s Dean?”

“Dean?”  It sounds confused and plaintive.  “I don’t know, he wasn’t there when I woke up.  One minute I was home with mom, the next I was in an ash heap in the woods.”

Sam doesn’t know what to do with that answer, so he moves on.  “How did you know where to find this place?” 

“I was scared.  I just . . . I ran, you know?  When I hit the highway I saw a sign and figured out you were nearby, so I came here.”  It looks down at the knife warily.  “I kind of figured you guys were expecting me.”

The creature certainly  _looks_  like it woke up in an ash heap and then ran through the woods.  Its dirty skin is streaked with sweat stains and covered in scratches.  Sam feels its ragged breathing beneath his hands.  He remembers holding the very same knife to Dean’s throat after he crawled out of Hell.

Sam twists maybe-Kevin’s arm behind its back.  “We’re going inside so I can test you.  You try anything, you die.”

Maybe-Kevin nods slightly.  It’s perfectly docile on the walk to the kitchen.  It doesn’t argue or complain, and it makes no effort to reason with Sam or convince him of its identity.  The silence is entirely un-Kevin-like.  It doesn’t object when Sam ties it to a kitchen chair, either, and it doesn’t seem to care that it’s still stark naked. 

Sam throws holy water and borax on it, and cuts it with silver and iron, but none of the tests have an effect.  It sits there without flinching, and looks around the kitchen curiously. 

“Everything is so _sharp_ ,” it says.   It sounds awed.

The holy oil is the last test Sam can think of.  He’s never tried it before, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work.  He pours it into an oil candle and holds the flame up to Maybe-Kevin’s hand for a couple of seconds.  Angels die when they touch burning holy oil, humans don’t.  This creature doesn’t.  It sits there afterward and blinks at him, looking confused. 

“That hurt,” it says.  “A whole fucking lot.”  It’s not an accusation. There’s rising emotion in its voice, something between fear and excitement.  Its lips twitch, and it seems to struggle with itself for a moment before it starts to laugh.  It laughs so hard it doubles over in the chair, its arms straining where they’re tied behind its back.  It laughs so hard the laughter turns breathless and silent, and it struggles for air in painful, sobbing gasps.   

 “I’m bleeding,” he chokes out once he’s able to talk.  “That’s my blood.”  Sam follows his gaze to the kitchen floor.  There’s a small trail of blood smears where Sam half-dragged, half-marched him into the room.  He cut his feet when he ran barefoot through the woods.  Of course he did.

“I’m alive!” Kevin shrieks through laughter.  “I’m alive, you fucker!  I’m alive!”      

 

 **II.**     

The Veil is a sheer curtain in front of reality.  It washes out light and color, muffles sound, and erases touch, taste, and smell. 

Even when Kevin manifested, he was never fully in the room.  His new skin feels tender and exposed, constantly under assault.  The sun is too hot, his clothes are too rough, and even a hand on his shoulder is an unsettling intimacy.  He’d thought for so long he’d never touch anyone again.

Later, all he has of those first hours are disjointed memories of rifling through the refrigerator wrapped in an old blanket, the cold air hitting his face as he crams apples and pears into his mouth. The juice runs in rivulets down his arms, carving sticky tracks in the filth left on his skin from the ash pile.  Somewhere along the way Sam pulls him into a crushing hug, looking red-eyed and scarily intense.  Kevin still feels like he’s floating two feet above himself, watching his body from the outside, and it doesn’t occur to him that he’s supposed to hug Sam back.  He just kind of stands there until Sam mutters ‘sorry’ and lets him go.

Kevin’s at the kitchen table scooping peanut butter into his mouth with his fingers when Castiel shows up.  He does his best to keep his eyes on the peanut butter, playing at obliviousness, but tracks Castiel’s movements around the room.  Angels are dangerous, and this one has a violent temper.

“You think you could check him out?” Sam asks.

Out of the corner of his eye Kevin sees Castiel stalk toward him, a hand out to touch his face.  He kicks over the kitchen chair and backs away.  “Fuck off!”

Sam steps between them and holds up his hand to stop Castiel.  The angel pauses, and Sam puts an arm around Kevin’s shoulder.  “It’s okay,” he says.  “Cas is our friend.  He just wants to check if you’re hurt.”

Kevin objects to the use of the word “our” there, but his back is to the wall, and he’s physically caged in between Castiel and Sam, so he doesn’t have a lot of options.  He quiets down.  Castiel lays a hand on his forehead, cool and impersonal as a doctor, and he doesn’t die. 

“It’s him,” Castiel says to Sam.  “His body seems intact, but in order for me to know for sure about his soul I’ll have to—“

“We’re not doing that,” Sam interrupts.  “He said he remembers being with his mother as a ghost, so it’s there.”  Castiel looks like he’s about to argue, but Sam says, “If I change my mind I’ll let you know.”

“How?”  Kevin says to the two of them.  “Why?”  He’s still only half accepted he’s alive, and that’s as close as he knows how to get to asking what the hell is going on.

“I’d like to know that myself,” Sam says to Castiel.  “If it wasn’t you that raised him, and it wasn’t me . . . he showed up so soon after Dean went missing.  It seems like they must be related.”  Sam says it wi th the zeal of a man suggesting the lights in the sky are alien spacecraft.

“Sam, it wasn’t Dean.”  There’s a softness in Castiel’s voice that might almost be compassion.  “Metatron put spells in place to prevent the calling of a new prophet, but the earth still requires one.  The angels opened the gates of Heaven at the same time Dean died.  It seems likely that when Kevin’s soul tried to pass through them, he was thrown back down to earth.”

Kevin can feel all the questions he wants to ask well up inside him, but before he can put them into words Sam says, “Then where _is_  Dean?  How did he disappear?”  And the two of them are walking out of the room together, leaving Kevin alone with his peanut butter and his bewildering new body.         

It must be Sam who calls his mother.  In those early hours Kevin’s too disoriented to make a decision that practical.  The two of them spend the better part of a day in each other’s arms, overjoyed just to be alive in the same place at the same time. 

If you’d asked him during the months he thought she was dead, he would have said that if he had her back he’d never raise his voice to her again.  He’s sure she’d have said the same thing during the months he was haunting their home.  She’d been worryingly gentle with him after he’d died, indulging him in ways she never had while he was alive.  And yet as soon as he’s strong enough to form coherent sentences they start arguing.  

She asks him to come home with her.   _Tells_ him, really, the same way she used to tell him what enriching after school activities he’d do each school year.  He’s not having it.  Crowley thinks he’s dead.  Everyone thinks he’s dead.  He’s not about to ruin that tremendous piece of good luck by announcing his resurrection in the most obvious way possible.  He shudders at the thought of having to move back into his childhood bedroom, anyway.  He’s nineteen, and he wants the chance to live his life as an adult.   

He pushes his mom to move into the bunker, instead.  She’d be safe here, and he still feels guilty for forcing her off the houseboat and making her into an easy target for Crowley.  She refuses.  What would she do here?  She has a job in Michigan, and a house that’s paid off, and friends who support her.  She just got her life back, and she doesn’t want to give it up again.

They yell until one of them is in tears, and then they hug and say, “I love you” a hundred times a piece.  Those seem to be the only three words they can agree on.  Kevin stubbornly refused every invitation to leave with her, but as he watches her car pull away from the bunker something cracks inside him, and he collapses into a ridiculous, sobbing mess on the gravel in the front drive.  She calls him twenty minutes later, pulled over on the side of a Kansas highway.  She doesn’t sound much better off.  They talk for the next three hours.  He calls her pretty much every day after that.

Sam emerges from the depths of the stacks later that evening, looking like he hasn’t gone to bed since Kevin arrived.  A flicker of disappointment crosses his face when he finds Kevin hanging around the library playing Minecraft on his laptop, and Kevin realizes too late that Sam had expected him to leave with his mother.  Of course he had.  Sam’s doesn’t want to deal with a houseguest while his brother is missing in action.

Sam quickly hides his reaction and says that of course Kevin’s welcome to stay as long as he likes.  Kevin feels embarrassed anyway—until that moment he hadn’t considered that his bid for independence involved him sleeping under Sam’s roof, eating his food, and drinking his whiskey without paying rent.  It’s not like he’s planning to crash here forever, but he figures it’s going to be a few months before he knows what he wants to do next.  He’s walked into walls at full speed at least a half dozen times in the past few days because he forgets he can’t pass through them, and just this afternoon he tried to make a grilled cheese sandwich only to set his hand down squarely on the glowing red burner.  These aren’t the signs of a guy who’s ready to strike out on his own.  

“I can help you,” Kevin says.  “I want to help find Dean.”  And he does.  Partly because Dean was-- _is_ \--his friend, or as close to a friend as Kevin’s got left, and partly because it seems like the best way to make himself less of a freeloader.

Sam shows him the note he found on Dean’s bed.  Kevin’s private opinion is that if a corpse wanders off and tells you to leave it alone, there’s something to be said for listening to it.  But it’s not his brother, so it’s not his call. 

He combs through the library looking for explanations that he puts onto index cards he pins to a corkboard over his desk.  He reviews the morning news reports from across the country and presents Sam with anything that looks like it might be evidence of Dean, or of whatever’s currently in charge of Dean’s body.  Sam disappears with the information, going off on hunts he never fully describes.  He comes back from these trips hard-eyed and focused, sharpening knives and cleaning guns with military efficiency.  Sometimes there are other tools among the weapons, bloody needles and razors that don’t look like they’d be useful in a fight.  Kevin doesn’t ask what they’re for because he doesn’t want to know.  

Time is slippery in those first weeks, and sometimes Sam returns from hunts Kevin didn’t know he was on.  Kevin’s biological rhythms were shot to hell by their long interruption, and living underground doesn’t help him reset them.  He eats French toast at four in the afternoon and spaghetti at midnight. 

More often than not he falls asleep at the library table while he works.  He never slept as a ghost, and after months of wakefulness he’s out of the habit.  Sleep catches him off-guard when he’s sitting in the library stacks, or finds him slumped over a bowl of cereal.  One time he dozes off leaning against the kitchen counter, halfway through making a peanut butter sandwich. 

He hates going to bed.  The rhythm of his own breathing feels alien after so long without it, and lying there alone in the dark he’s too often struck with a painful, specific consciousness of every breath he takes.  What if he forgets to do it?  What if he spends the rest of his life fixated on this relentless biological process, unable to think about anything but the unending need to force air in and out of his lungs? 

When he does manage to sleep, he dreams.  It’s not the memory of dying that haunts him.  Dying was a brief moment of concern followed by an instant of white hot pain, and then nothing.  Getting murdered was among the _least_  traumatic things to happen to him over the last three years.  It’s what came afterward that he relives.  He’s looked down for the longest time before he’d recognized his own mutilated face, the terrible black empty sockets where his eyes should be.  He’d screamed for Dean, and when Dean didn’t answer him he’d just screamed, terrified and silent, the way people do in nightmares.  Too many nights he wakes up with a strangled cry caught in his throat, half-convinced he’ll find his body on the floor.

When Sam is around Kevin mostly doesn’t bother with bed, preferring to curl up in an armchair just out of Sam’s line of sight.  He finds the warm, lived-in feel of the library comforting, and as long as Sam is working he can focus on the rattle of books and papers instead of the sound of his own breathing.  When he wakes up from a nightmare all he has to do is speak, and Sam will answer, and then he can be sure he’s still alive.              

During the day, safe from the threat of sleep, Kevin often finds himself suddenly giddy, flush with energy of youth.  He may be a prophet until he dies—again—but as long as no one digs another magic rock out of the ground there’s nothing to translate, which means no more migraines or strokes.  He’d forgotten how sweet it was to live without chronic pain.  Food tastes better than he remembered, and the summer air is warmer.  Sometimes in the middle of a conversation he catches himself smiling too brightly, bouncing on his heels too enthusiastically, and he’s struck silent by the sorrowful weight of Sam’s eyes.  The guy’s brother’s undead.  Kevin does his best to rein it in when they’re together.    

In private, though, he daydreams about his future.  It’s probably a bad idea to stay in the country—Crowley would notice him eventually if he wandered too close to his old home—but if he changes his name and moves far enough away there’s no reason he can’t have, if not a normal life, at least a _life_.  He drafts applications for the spring semester at mediocre colleges in Puerto Rico and the Bahamas under the name Kevin Nguyen, and gives himself a good, but not suspiciously excellent, academic history.  An American-accredited college in Paris is his favorite option.  He was supposed to go to Paris for his senior trip and never made it, but his French is still pretty good.  In his free time he listens to French lessons on his iPod and pictures flirting with beautiful Parisians in scenic cafes. 

He keeps the applications a secret.  Even if he’s admitted he wouldn’t start until January.  He doesn’t know if he’s going to feel ready for college in six months, or if that’s even still what he’ll want, and he doesn’t need his mom or Sam pushing him into it.  He likes having a plan belongs only to him.

Even if he were tempted to share his dreams, there’s a coldness in this new, driven Sam that discourages sharing confidences.  Sam all but ignores him for days at a time, reading off spells from the next room and dropping fresh stacks of books on the table without making eye contact.  Sometimes it feels like he resents every moment Kevin’s existence steals from search for Dean.

But every so often Kevin finds the right bit of information, or draws a clever connection between a murder in St. Louis and a convenience store robbery in Culver City, and Sam’s tired eyes light up.  Sam’s surprised smile and the quick brush of his hand on the back of Kevin’s neck gives him the same rush of pleasure he used to feel when he got a handwritten compliment on an essay, combined with a rawer, lower warmth that leaves him restless long after Sam’s wandered off.    

Kevin finds himself replaying the afternoon when Sam bandaged him up after he gave his blood to Crowley.  He’d expected a speech when he’d refused, something self-righteous about barbecues and marathons.  When Sam started packing up it was the first entirely un-creepy nice thing anyone had done for him in years, and Kevin had stuck himself with the needle before he’d known he’d changed his mind. Afterward Sam had taken him up to the kitchen and held a paper towel against the crook of his arm until the bleeding stopped, his hands warm and careful.  Their knees had touched under the table, and Sam’s hair brushed against Kevin’s cheek as he leaned in to inspect the damage.  In Kevin’s imagination the scene keeps going, shading into the glimpses he’s caught of Sam’s sweat-drenched body in the exercise room, the taut muscles of his bare chest straining as he does pull-ups.  Kevin imagines licking the sweat from Sam’s pecs, and then pushing him back against the table until . . . It’s a problem.

Kevin spent most of the last three years hiding in places without mirrors, or else too busy to look into them, and for the past several months he couldn’t see himself at all.  In his mind he still looks like the awkward, baby-faced boy he was at sixteen, but adolescence kept working on him while he ignored it, and the mirrors in the bunker show him a familiar-looking stranger, this man with a five-o’clock shadow and a sharp jawline.  His mother mentions one day on the phone that he looks like his father at twenty, and it makes him smile.   He’s beginning to see himself as a man Sam might want. 

 

**III.**

Sam’s half-afraid Cas will look at the spot where Kevin’s eating peanut butter and see nothing but an empty chair.  Sam’s head is a vase glued back together, never quite whole again since the Wall came down, even after Cas healed him.  Dean is dead, or worse than dead, and Sam can feel pieces of his mind threatening to crumble off and make a bid for freedom. Kevin could be one of the fragments, a shard of guilt embodied, naked and feral as if it had just crawled up out of his subconscious.  He’s almost surprised when it turns out it’s _not_  a hallucination. 

His doubts return in dark hours, though, long after Linda’s come and gone.  After days spent underground, searching the library stacks for a key to the mystery, it sometimes seems possible Sam’s whole world is an illusion, his brain folded in on itself like origami.  Anyone might be waiting for him around the bends of the long low hallways:  Dean, Jess, Lucifer.  Seated across the table, Kevin leans on his hand over the old books of demonology in the same weary way he once leaned over the tablets, his hair falling against his cheek, his eyes blinking slowly.  If Sam’s brain built a Kevin out of memories, this is what he’d look like.

Sam tries his best to dismiss those thoughts when they intrude, redoubling his efforts to treat Kevin like the real person Sam’s usually certain he is.  When Sam forces himself to rest—he needs to sleep so he stays sharp, he has an alert on his phone to remind him--sometimes he pulls Kevin away from the clutter of his cold coffee and sandwich crusts to watch TV.  There are no communal living spaces in the bunker, just austere conference tables and straight-backed chairs, so they watch in Sam’s room.

The walls of Sam’s bedroom are covered from floor to ceiling with protective sigils.  After he cast out Gadreel, he’d spent dozens of hours creating an intricate web of interlocking designs only visible under black light, standing on a chair to reach overhead.  No one but him has entered the room in the months since.  He and Dean hadn’t been on good terms at the time, and neither one of them had felt like having a movie night.  Kevin’s casual presence, sprawled out on the bed beside him, makes him uncomfortable in ways he didn’t expect.  The very fact that that Kevin can walk through the sigils proves he’s not a threat, and yet it unnerves Sam to have someone violating the integrity of his safe room.  Kevin’s an uncontrolled variable. 

But Sam enjoys his company, too.  He likes watching Kevin get into one-sided arguments with the characters on the _West Wing_ , sounding like the politician he’d once wanted to be.  Sam thinks he’d make a good lawyer, and maybe one day he will.  With the tablets destroyed he can do whatever he wants. 

Kevin seems to have come back from death with a craving for sleep, and he rarely makes it through more than an episode or two.  Sam catches himself inventing reasons not to wake him up, turning back to his research in the small hours while new episodes start up automatically.  He likes feeling Kevin’s weight beside him while he works.

When Sam’s too exhausted to follow even the most familiar plot, he finds comfort in slow, informational, “the secret life of cephalopods” style nature shows filled with beautiful landscapes and soothing narration.  Kevin takes an endearingly genuine interest in these programs, pointing out the animals he hopes to see one day and the places he wants to travel.  He talks about going to Canberra for days after he sees a documentary about its kangaroo infestation.  

The Kevin who crawled out of the pyre is softer than the one Sam remembers, young and hopeful now that he has a second chance at life.  His smile comes more easily, without the sharp edge of bitterness that used to color it.  Sometimes Sam wants to gather him up and protect him from the world, from his future, from Sam himself.  Other times Sam wants to slap him in the face.

Kevin came back from death to find his mother alive and the tablet smashed.  Never in all their myriad resurrections have the Winchesters been so lucky.  Watching Kevin glow with good health while Dean is gone gnaws at Sam’s heart.  When Kevin falls asleep at the library table after working for twelve hours, Sam has to fight the urge to shake him.  _How can you sleep when he’s missing? What right do you have to rest until we find him?_ And sometimes, late at night, _Why did it have to be_ you _I got back?  Why are you alive when he’s dead?_    He lets Kevin sleep and goes running instead, pounding the pavement mile after mile until his feet blister and his breath comes in ragged sobs. 

When Cas comes back to discuss the case Kevin disappears into the depths of the bunker.  Sam understands.  Cas isn’t especially intimidating these days, the sputtering remnants of his grace making him listless and sickly, but Kevin has an excellent reason to be afraid of angels.  If Cas weren’t _Cas_ , Sam wouldn’t be thrilled about letting an angel into the bunker himself.   And yet Sam drags Kevin out of his room to talk about his research, even though he spends the whole time staring sullenly at the floor, slowly edging away until his back is pressed against the wall.  Watching them talk to each other, however miserably, makes him feel sane.  If Cas can see Kevin, he must be real.      

Sam’s relieved when Cas agrees there’s a lead solid enough to pursue.  The familiar ritual of the hunt has a harsh efficiency that helps him block out his other thoughts.  On the road in a stolen car his feelings drain out of him until the inside of his chest is hollow and clean.  The anonymous sameness of the motel rooms he stops at feels more like home than his bedroom in the bunker ever has, consoling in the familiarity of their musty sheets and empty queen beds. 

He likes to imagine himself as singular, free of any purpose beyond finding Dean, but the truth is he’s never entirely alone.  Kevin calls him at odd hours, offering scraps of information or the sort of odd intuitions that only strike when you’re halfway through your third glass of whiskey.  Sam tries to stay clipped and professional on these calls, but late at night when he’s sharpening knives and laying them out on the faded paisley bedspread, the thought of Kevin waiting back in the bunker nags at him like a loose tooth.  He can feel Kevin’s eyes burning into the back of his neck every time he lies to a mark or kills a vessel, keeping a catalog of sins he could never know about across hundreds of miles.  That’s supposed to be Dean’s role, and Sam resents that his imagination has passed it off to this boy.

After two weeks on the road without a break, Sam carves up a demon somewhere outside Des Moines, using Ruby’s knife to trace the same patterns into her skin that Lucifer once cut into him.  At least his time in Hell was good for something.  She doesn’t know anything, or else she’s remarkably loyal, because he unravels her into a sticky mess of component parts and still gets no answers.  The pile of organs on the floor is worthless, a signpost that sends him back to step one.  When he heads for Kansas his skin is tacky with blood.

He walks through the door of the bunker at 3am, hoping to fall into bed and sleep off the memory of what he’s done.  He’s caught off guard by the blazing lights in the main rooms.  The music crackling at top volume through hidden speakers pierces his brain like a needle.

“You’re here!” Kevin says, bouncing through the map room.  “Why didn’t say you were coming back?”  He’s grinning and a little drunk.   “Check out what I found.  Someone hid a huge record collection behind the Aramaic scrolls.  John Coltrane,” he points up at the untraceable music, “Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, all these amazing jazz records from the fifties.”

Kevin looks delighted.  Sam can imagine Dean holding up a record with the same childlike enthusiasm, and something cracks inside him.  “What the hell is this?” Sam says, voice quiet and tight so that he doesn’t yell.  Kevin stops short.  “This is what you do while I’m gone?  Dean’s missing, and you’re playing records?” 

“No, I mean, _yes_ , but I just took a quick break.”  Kevin looks like he was caught robbing a bank.  Sam hears himself snap, “Go to bed,” in a tone borrowed from his father as he pushes past.  The music cuts off behind him a moment later.  He barely makes it to the bathroom before his stomach turns itself inside out, and he throws up everything he’s eaten for the past two days.  Mostly it’s just coffee and bile.  He can smell the remnants of demon blood on his hands and in his hair, and it starts him retching again.  He ends up sitting in the shower, scrubbing himself down until the water goes cold, and he’s still got the phantom smell of gore in his nose.  He worries Kevin can hear him.  He misses the sterile isolation of a motel room.      

When he drags himself back out to the main rooms in the morning, his throat raw and his eyes grainy, Kevin’s already at one the library tables, a stack of paper in front of him.  “That’s what I did while you were gone,” Kevin says without looking up from the book he’s reading. 

The research is extensive. It’s also carefully arranged in a way Kevin never bothers with, well-organized and neatly presented.  Sam’s pretty sure that part is a last minute addition.  He pictures Kevin staying up the rest of the night putting his notes in perfect order with hostile precision, proving Sam was wrong about him with every cross-reference.  It’s the most gloriously passive-aggressive act of alphabetization Sam’s ever seen.  It’s designed to make him feel guilty, and it _does_ , but he has to hide a smile when he flips through it anyway.  It’s such a Kevinish gesture.

Sam sets the notes down.  “I’m sorry about last night.  I know how hard you’re working, and it means a lot to me.”        

Kevin’s posture relaxes a bit, and he meets Sam’s eyes.  “I’m doing everything I can, but—“

“Seriously, I was in a bad place.  It had nothing to do with you.  I just wanted to yell at someone.”

“I get that.”  Kevin looks down and twirls his pen.  “He’s your only family.  And sometimes it feels like, people are still watching TV, and eating sandwiches, and doing all this stupid crap, and how can they do that when the worst thing in the world has happened?  But you know, I did find my mom eventually.  I’m sure you’ll find Dean too.”

Sam nods, even though in his experience these kinds of stories rarely end as well as it did for Kevin and his mother. “You want to show me those records?”

Kevin gives Sam a dubious half-smile.  “It’s okay, really.  You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to.”  It’s a lie.  Even under the best circumstances, he wouldn’t care much—cool old records are the rare kind of historical discovery that would excite Dean more than Sam.  As it stands, he’s exhausted and sore, and there’s a permanent itch under his skin that flares up every time he stops looking for Dean, even long enough to eat and sleep.  But Kevin lights up, and Sam can give him twenty minutes.

They sit cross-legged on the floor in front of the shelf of Aramaic texts, and Kevin shows him the little vault that’s hidden behind it, filled with a collection rock and jazz albums some Man of Letters didn’t want his straight-laced colleagues to know about. 

Kevin barely knew who most of the musicians were when he found the records, but he’s been on online doing research, and has applied himself to it with the same obsessive intensity he gives every new project.  He’s got release dates and biographies memorized already, and strong opinions he seems to have borrowed from the people on the music forums who’d helped him figure out what he had.  He seems to be under the impression Sam may not know who Miles Davis is, that this music and how it makes him feel belongs uniquely to him. 

Sam nods along.  He doesn’t absorb a lot of what Kevin’s saying, but he enjoys watching him, alive and happy.  They’re close enough that Kevin’s knee rests against his, and he brushes against Sam’s arm every time he reaches for a record.  It’s comforting.  It’s been a while since anyone’s touched Sam, except to hurt him. 

“So, did you listen to this kind of stuff as a kid?” Kevin asks.

Sam looks at him incredulously.  “I was born in 1983.  How old do you think I am?”  There’s a brief silence in which Sam senses that the difference between 1983 and 1953 isn’t nearly as clear in Kevin’s head as Sam might like. 

“Oh,” he says, and sounds placating.  “What _did_  you listen to, then?”

Sam shrugs.  “Whatever my dad listened to, mostly.  He had a box of classic rock tapes and he played them all the time in the car.”  And so did Dean, later on, but this is a nice moment and he doesn’t trust himself to say Dean’s name.  “When I was thirteen this boy I liked made me mix tape, and I was dying to listen, but I didn’t have any way to play it.  I must’ve spent the better part of a month raking leaves and picking up cans to get the money to buy a Walkman.”  He still has that Walkman.  He left it behind when he went to Stanford, and once it outlived its usefulness Dean turned it into an EMF meter.  All roads lead back to his brother.      

Kevin’s smiling up at him with an edge of mischief.  “A Walkman?  A _cassette_ Walkman?  Did your dad power the car with his feet, too?”

Sam smiles back in spite of himself.  They’ve drifted imperceptibly closer over the course of the conversation, until their knees are touching and their sleeves brush against each other when they move.  Sam looks down into Kevin’s hopeful eyes, and suddenly he understands all the smiling and touching. 

For an instant Sam allows himself to imagine what it would be like to lean in and kiss away the smile that’s lingering on Kevin’s lips, but he only gets as far as the image of his hand on Kevin’s face before his brain flashes back to touching Kevin’s forehead and seeing his eyes burn in their sockets. 

He doesn’t understand Kevin’s interest anyway.  Flirting with Sam is like flirting with an open wound.  A few hours ago he was huddled in the bathroom, bloody and vomiting, and a few hours before that . . .

He edges subtly away as he talks, putting just enough space between them that the edge of Kevin’s shirt sleeve slides off his wrist.  And that’s the end of it.  But he picks at the memory like a scab in the days that follow, studying Kevin when he’s engrossed in a TV show or hunched over a book, considering the softness of his hair when it falls over his wrist as he naps on his folded arm, the warm glow of his skin when he comes back from a walk, the dark sweep of his lashes across his cheek as he looks down at a scroll.  Sam pictures kissing him, and he pictures killing him, but he can never quite untangle the two, and the failure nibbles along the edges of his consciousness.  One more thing he can’t do.

He feels a little more useless with every day he spends cooped up indoors, and every evening he wastes watching nature shows.  It’s been two weeks since Dean’s trail, if it ever was a trail, dead-ended in the cooling intestines of a demon.  Sam’s stranded high and dry in the bunker, unable to find enough information to justify another hunt.  He’s climbing the walls.

He calls Cas to discuss his options, hoping there’s some angle he missed.  All he gets out of the conversation is that Cas’s cough is rawer than the last time they talked, his voice thin and fading.  Sam knows nothing about the diseases of angels.  The prognosis could be six months or six days.  Cas’s grace could gutter out between this phone call and the next, and Sam would never know.  Cas is too kind, or too proud, or too alien, to warn Sam that he’s dying.   

“I miss him,” Cas says just as Sam’s about to hang up.  Sam forces his voice under control and says, “Yeah, man, I miss him too.”  Sam can still remember when Castiel was stony and impervious, a being who seemed beyond human weakness.  How thoroughly they’ve poisoned him.

Sam’s scarcely off the phone before he drags Kevin away from his books.  They’re going to watch TV.  Right now.  Kevin’s annoyed by the interruption, be he stops arguing when he looks up and sees Sam’s face.  Tonight’s a night for nature shows, without question.  Sam stares at the screen, and barely even hears the narration.  Kevin hugs his knees and steals glances at Sam when he thinks they’ll go unnoticed. 

“Bad news?” he asks carefully when the episode ends.

“No, no there’s no news,” Sam says.  “There’s never any news.”

Kevin nods slightly, like maybe he gets it, and his body gradually uncoils.  He nods off somewhere in the middle of a public television program about nutrias, rumpled and vulnerable in sleep.  Sam, like Dean, is almost always fully dressed, even in the relative safety of the bunker.  He only takes his boots off when he goes to bed, and these days sometimes not even then.  But Kevin hasn’t picked up that habit, and he looks unshelled in his t-shirt and his bare feet.  Sam’s touched by how easily he sleeps here, how trusting he is so close to the man who killed him. 

Sam turns off the lamp by the bed.  It’s not really a decision.  Sometimes hands just do things, even when all the voices in your head belong to you.  He’s not prepared for the silence that follows when the nature shows stop automatically loading.  There are are no recorded voices to keep him company, no research to occupy his mind.  He feels Kevin’s presence more sharply than ever before, and it’s as unsettling as a smudged sigil on the wall.

And yet Sam’s comforted by the feeling of Kevin’s weight on the other side of the bed.  Some nights Sam still dreams of Kevin’s eyes burning, and he doesn’t want to knock on his bedroom door to check if he’s alive.  Here Sam can keep guard.  It’s a futile guard--the only thing in the bunker that’s likely to hurt Kevin is Sam himself--but he finds peace in the act just the same.

Sam doesn’t sleep much, dozing on and off when he’s lulled by the steady rhythm of Kevin’s breathing and the occasional shift of his limbs.  At 5:59am he switches off his alarm before it rings and gets dressed to go running.  He moves as quietly as he can, but he hears the creak of bedsprings behind him and turns to find Kevin sitting up, his flattened on one side, blinking muzzily.  Kevin glances around the room until his eyes land on the clock, and then he turns to Sam in confusion.  “Um,” he says.  

“It’s early,” Sam says.  “Go back to sleep.”

Kevin lies back down, but Sam can feel him watching with curious eyes.  He doesn’t ask Sam for an explanation, which is good because Sam doesn’t have one.   

 

**IV.**

Kevin falls asleep listening to a monotone discussion of nutrias, and wakes with a jolt, shaking with the memory of hiding somewhere small and dark.  The room is silent, and the alarm clock says it’s 3:12am.  Sam’s sleeping on his side, facing Kevin, his face half obscured by a stray piece of hair. 

What the actual fuck?  Sam could’ve dozed off watching TV--he never actually _has_ , but he works practically 24/7, so there’s no reason why he wouldn’t.  Except the lamp is off, which means it’s not an accident.  At some point Sam made a conscious decision to turn out the light and sleep next to Kevin on top of the bed in all his clothes.

It unnerves Kevin in the way all out-of-character actions do.  He’s learned the hard way that sometimes Sam is Sam, but other times Sam’s a demon with shitty acting skills or an angel with good ones.  Just like sometimes Mom is Crowley, and sometimes Crowley is Kevin, or at least Kevin’s sadistic subconscious.  He not genuinely worried Sam’s a monster—if nothing else, monsters don’t generally want to nap with you—but still, Sam should have the courtesy to act like himself.

He’s tempted to wake Sam up and demand an explanation, but he doesn’t.  Elbowing Sam might lead to a satisfying answer, but knowing Sam it probably wouldn’t.  Either way, having registered his protest, Kevin would have to get the hell out of the man’s bedroom.  He imagines the rest of his night if he leaves:  wandering alone through the windowless halls, or settling into the empty library with his earbuds in to wall out the silence.  He’s goddamned tired, eyes stinging and limbs heavy, but the thought of the dead stillness waiting in his own bedroom is intolerable.  If Sam’s strange mood means he gets to sleep on a bed for more than an hour at a time, he’ll take it.  He edges ever so slightly closer, into the circle of warmth that surrounds Sam’s body, careful not to touch him.  He feels like he’s getting away with something, even though it was Sam who let him stay,  and he starts devising defensive comebacks in case Sam catches him lying here, wide awake and a fraction of an inch away.  Excuses prove as good as sheep, and Kevin spends the rest of the night dreaming he’s justifying some obscure but terrible mistake to Sam, or his mom, or possibly the AP English teacher he’d had a crush on in the tenth grade.

In the morning Kevin lurks around the kitchen, nursing his third cup of coffee and waiting for Sam to get back from his run.  He’s not at all sure how he’s supposed to feel about what happened.  Two grown men don’t share a bed unless there’s something going on between them, but as much as Kevin might like to believe this was some painfully awkward attempt to make a move on him, it just feels like the wrong interpretation.  And after all, Kevin could’ve left when he woke up in the night, and he didn’t. He’s pretty sure a line was crossed, but he doesn’t know which of them crossed it, and he can’t decide whether he should feel apologetic that he stayed or angry that Sam let him. 

More than anything, he’s afraid it was an act of kindness.  He worries sometimes that Sam’s gestures of friendship are all dreary obligation, and that he secretly resents every minute he spends with Kevin that takes away from his search for Dean.  There are days when Kevin feels like a sad, creepy remora that’s latched itself onto Sam’s underbelly, feeding on crumbs of attention.

Sam’s hypothetical pity makes Kevin burn with the shame, and that pisses him off.  He’s not pathetic.  Hell, he could be in France right now if he wanted to be.  It’s Sam who suggests they watch TV, and it’s Sam who asked to see the records he found.  And okay, Kevin is the one who keeps stealing shuteye on Sam’s bed, but it’s perfectly normal to fall asleep when you’re watching TV late at night.  Sam’s the one who made it weird.  If anyone’s a sad, creepy remora it’s Sam, and that’s exactly what Kevin plans to say to him when he gets back.

Except when Sam walks into the kitchen he’s so entirely casual that he steals the words out of Kevin’s mouth.  “You sleep well?” Sam says as he brushes past to pour himself a cup of coffee.  He’s sweaty from his run, his damp hair sticking to his forehead, his soft gray shirt stained with a dark V.  It suddenly feels ridiculous to yell at him about fish.

“Yeah,” Kevin says.  Even with his 3am crisis he slept more hours at one time than he’s done since he came back.  He hesitates for a moment before he adds, “Sorry I fell asleep in your room.”  He’s not, but he wants to see what Sam has to say about it, and if the remora thing is off the table then an apology is the only way he can see to get into the topic.        

“No, no, it’s fine.” Sam sounds like a gracious host offering up the last slice of pizza, and Kevin doesn’t like it.

“I’ve got my own bedroom, you know,” he says with an edge of irritation.  “I don’t need to sleep in yours.” 

The cup of coffee stops halfway to Sam’s mouth, and his self-confidence sloughs off between one breath and the next.  “I know that,” he says, his eyes fixed on the mug.  “I just thought . . . I don’t know what I thought.  I’ve shared a bedroom with Dean most of my life, and when it wasn’t him it was a roommate or a girlfriend, a boyfriend.  I’m used to it, having someone there.”  Sam swallows.  “I’m sorry.  I should’ve woken you up.”

Kevin instantly feels guilty for having questioned Sam, and for feeling relieved by his explanation.  “No, I didn’t mean it like that.  It was totally fine.  I really did sleep well.  Better.”

Sam nods and they both stand there in uncomfortable silence.  “Hey,” Kevin says when he can’t stand it anymore, “let me show you that book I was working on last night.”  He hurries them the hell out of the kitchen and the conversation both.

And so nothing is resolved.  Most nights they still sit over their papers until they can’t, and take sleep where it finds them.  Some nights Sam asks Kevin to watch TV with him, and on those nights Sam lets him stay. 

There’s a half-hearted pretense that it’s a recurring accident, which means they sleep on top of the covers, in all their clothes, every time.  Kevin privately finds it funny, and yet he’s not really sure he’d want to sleep _in_  the bed, even if Sam offered.  It would feel like a step too far, an act too intimate to fit into the in-between space they’ve settled on.

He wakes up a dozen times a night at first.  He’s never shared a bedroom before, let alone a bed.  The year he spent hiding out in abandoned buildings got him used to maintaining a certain level of vigilance, even in sleep, listening for demons or for the kind of men who lurk in such places.  He interprets every shift of Sam’s body as a threat. The danger humans pose was the first lesson Kevin learned after he escaped from Crowley.  Sigils don’t keep them out and holy water doesn’t burn them.  He’d spent countless nights running from midnight drug deals he’d unwittingly interrupted, and houses that turned out to have been claimed by guys who were bigger and better armed.  Once he’d woken up to some weirdo fondling his crotch.  He was lucky that shrieking about demons proved to be an effective defense.      

His subconscious slowly adjusts to Sam’s presence, so that he wakes less often, and with less fear, but sleep is still a struggle.  Some nights he finds himself lying awake, only to realize that Sam is awake next to him, the rhythm of his breathing all wrong.  The shared silence of insomnia is intolerable, and after a few minutes Kevin usually gets up and goes back out to the library to listen to his iPod.  Some nights his nightmares jolt him awake so violently that Sam wakes up and sees him shaking. The first time it happens Sam reaches for him, stroking his hair off his forehead and trying to hug him.  Kevin pulls away and walks out.  He wants that tenderness too badly to accept it.  He doesn’t think he can be in Sam’s arms and not do something creepy, not cross the indistinct line they’re walking on either side of.

Other nights Kevin wakes up calm and self-aware, while Sam is asleep across from him.  He finds himself drawn to Sam’s hand, splayed out between them on the bedspread.  It’s a big hand, as big as both of Kevin’s hands put together, with broad knuckles and a startlingly delicate wrist.  He’s always touched by Sam’s earnest concern over the fate of, say, a baby kangaroo when they watch nature shows together, and the thought of this powerful hand nurturing some fragile young creature nests in Kevin’s imagination among the other, less savory fantasies.  He’s tempted to reach out and run his fingers across it, but he never does.  It’s another line they don’t cross.

He can’t tell if there’s anything sexual in this arrangement for Sam.  He could swear Sam looks at him with desire sometimes, watching when he thinks Kevin’s engrossed in his work.  But when Kevin smiles and teases Sam rarely responds, and even when he does the words seem to come from far away, less flirtation than a half-remembered imitation of what flirtation might sound like.  Kevin’s mostly at peace with the idea that Sam’s too obsessed with his search for Dean to notice him.  One day soon Kevin will be at college, and he’ll get to have all the sex he wants, with all the beautiful people he can find. 

Although he’s not entirely sure what ‘soon’ is anymore.  He doesn’t feel normal, but he hasn’t walked into a wall in weeks, and he’d like to at least try to go to school.  Dean’s still missing, though, and Kevin can’t imagine abandoning Sam.  He’s grateful now he never mentioned the applications.  He doesn’t want Sam to feel guilty, and he doesn’t want his mother forcing him to pick between Sam and the future she thinks he should have.  The decision’s not as big a deal as either one of them would make it out to be if they knew.  If Dean’s still missing in January Kevin can always kill off his current identity and invent a new one to reapply in the fall.  He’s going to stay with Sam until Dean’s back or buried.

If Sam has nightmares he hides them successfully for the first few weeks.  When he finally fails, it’s Kevin’s fault.  Kevin falls asleep watching a political drama he doesn’t really understand, and wakes up to a violent struggle on the other side of the bed.  He screams while he’s still half-asleep and bolts upright, ready to fight for his life.  For an instant the room is nowhere he’s ever been before, but then he sees the outline of Sam’s shaggy head in the dark, and he remembers.  This is Sam’s bedroom, and there are no monsters here because if there were Sam would be battling them, not lying on the bed staring at him.

Kevin laughs breathlessly, giddy from the shock of adrenaline. “Sorry, man.  Sorry.  I guess we probably scared the hell out of each other, huh?” 

Sam keeps staring, wide-eyed and blank.  “You okay?” Kevin adds after a moment.  No reaction.  Sam’s eyes are pointed in his direction, but Kevin gets the feeling they’re looking at something else entirely.  It’s creepy as hell.

“I, uh, I guess I fell asleep in your room.  Again.  Sorry.”  Still nothing.  Kevin might as well be a ghost.  Which he’s definitely not.  He takes a deep breath to remind himself he can.  “It’s all right,” he says, although it clearly isn’t.  He feels the need to keep talking.  “It’s just me.  Kevin.  Your _friend_.”  Kevin hits that last word hard, because Sam’s body holds the tension of a snake about to strike.  “We fell asleep watching _The West Wing_ , remember?”

There’s a flicker of recognition in Sam’s eyes and he relaxes marginally before he hunches his shoulders and turns away.  “Are you okay?” Kevin says again, and this time there’s a slight twitch of Sam’s head that might pass for a nod.  Sam’s cradling his right hand in his left.  He runs his thumb across it over and over again like he’s soothing another person. 

This is something Kevin isn’t meant to see, something he would never have seen if he weren’t constantly making up excuses to camp out in this poor bastard’s bedroom.  He feels useless and embarrassed, an awkward intruder on Sam’s pain.

“I, uh, I guess I’ll get out of here.  I should go to bed.  My bed.”  He moves to get off the mattress.

“Stay,” Sam says sharply, and Kevin stops.  “I mean, if you want,” he adds, voice strained to approximate a reasonable tone.  “It’s fine.”

Kevin nods, even though Sam isn’t looking at him.  “You want to talk about it?” 

Sam doesn’t bother to look up.  “God, no.”  That’s good, because Kevin can’t imagine coming up with the right combination of words to make this better. 

“You want to go down to the library?  Sort books for a while or something?”  Sam shakes his head.  Kevin considers his options.   Anything is better than sitting here in silence. 

“Let’s just watch some TV, okay?”  Sam inclines his head slightly.  Kevin cautiously reaches past him and grabs the remote off the bedside table.  He has no idea what he’s putting on, it’s just reassuring white noise and flickering light.  Sam shifts and turns toward it, as if by instinct.  Kevin steals a glance at Sam’s face. His expression is blank, but his muscles are locked and he’s still rubbing his hand. 

There’s only a tiny gap separating them, and on impulse Kevin shifts his weight until he’s leaning against Sam’s side.  The flannel of Sam’s shirt is warm against his skin, and it reminds him of Sam sitting over him, carefully bandaging his elbow.  Sam doesn’t pull away, but he doesn’t respond either.  His body stays locked tight, his breathing fast and shallow.  Kevin wonders if he’s taking advantage. 

“Is this weird?” he asks.

Sam’s eyes stay fixed on the screen.  “Not for me,” he says flatly.  Kevin relaxes a little and lets his weight fall against Sam further, until his cheek rests against Sam’s shoulder and their knees touch.

There’s a fine trembling in Sam’s body that shakes Kevin where he rests.  After a moment Sam’s hands release each other, and Kevin feels an arm slip around his waist.  Its progress is stiff and awkward, like Sam doesn’t quite control it, and it feels taut and unyielding behind Kevin’s back.  When Sam’s hand lands on his hip Kevin covers it with his own.  The fingers are cold.

The soft murmur of the TV drones on, something about spaceships and salt vampires.  Kevin shuts his eyes and listens to Sam’s breathing as it slows and deepens.  The stiffness gradually passes out of Sam’s body, his muscles relaxing, the arm around Kevin’s waist softer and more natural.  After a while Sam’s other hand lands in Kevin’s hair and strokes it in a gentle, repetitive gesture, like Kevin is the one who needs to be comforted.  Sam rocks them slowly back and forth with a barely perceptible sway.  Kevin opens his eyes and looks up, but Sam’s still staring at the TV screen.

Some part of Kevin wants to warn Sam away from him.  He knows he should be heartbroken, concerned only about Sam’s terrible pain, but this cuts too close to fantasies he’s had.  He’s worried for Sam, he is, but he likes being touched by him in ways he knows damn well he shouldn’t.  He feels like history’s biggest bastard for getting a shiver from the feel of Sam’s nails scratching across his scalp.  He buries his face in the sleepy, familiar smell of Sam’s shirt and soaks up Sam’s fit of tenderness with a guilty heart. 

The shirt shifts under him until his mouth is pressed against the edge of a bare collar bone, and Kevin kisses it without conscious thought.  Sam freezes and Kevin freezes with him, his lips fixed on Sam’s skin.  Then the hand that’s been stroking his hair presses him forward. He kisses the collar bone again and moves cautiously upward, his mouth dry, brushing his lips against Sam’s neck and the vulnerable place where his jaw meets his throat.     

  Sam’s on top of him so fast he barely stops himself from flinching.  He’s pinned to the mattress, Sam’s tongue in his mouth, and pushing at Sam’s chest is like pushing at a thousand pound weight.  He manages to pull away enough to say, “You sure?”  Sam seems more asleep than awake.

Sam makes a sound that resembles “uh huh,” and Kevin figures that’s as good an answer as he’s going to get.  Sam’s eyes are wild and dead, consumed by a passion that seems to have little to do with the body under him.  He fumbles with the button on Kevin’s jeans, desperate and frustrated, until Kevin undoes it for him.  Kevin reaches for Sam’s belt buckle, but his hands are pinned over his head roughly, both wrists gripped in one of Sam’s hands.  Sam shoves his other hand down Kevin’s pants.  He thrusts against Kevin’s thigh in time with the rapid rhythm of his hand on Kevin’s cock, kissing him so hard he’s half-smothered, struggling for air.  Kevin comes with his back arched, gasping into Sam’s mouth.  Sam stills and groans, biting down painfully on Kevin’s neck. 

Sam goes slack afterward, his face pressed against Kevin’s throat, his breathing ragged, like sobs, although he doesn’t seem to be crying.  Kevin combs his fingers through the long, beautiful hair he’s thought so often about touching, and tries to come up with the right thing to say.  “It’s all right,” he murmurs, remembering what his mother used to tell him when he was sick, “It’s all right, sweetheart, it’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.”   

 

 **V.**  

Sam wakes with an overwhelming sense he’s screwed up.  He’s face down on Kevin’s chest, the material of the t-shirt stuck to his cheek.  It smells like sex, and the warm, familiar tang of sweat.  Kevin stirs beneath him.  His fingers comb through Sam’s hair, casually smoothing it into place.  Sam remembers the awful, frantic coupling of the night before, and he’s not sure how to square it with this gentleness.      

“Hi,” Kevin says with the hint of a smile, and peers down into Sam’s face.  He looks shy and hopeful, like Sam’s a one night stand he wants to talk into a second date, and not a horrifying human disaster who just sideswiped him.   

“Hi,” Sam says, dazed.  Kevin tips Sam’s chin up with a finger and kisses him, closed-lipped and sweet.  He hasn’t been kissed that way in a year and a half.  It takes him back to a miserable, adulterous rendezvous in fleabag motel.  It takes him back to a demon with strawberry lip gloss.  It takes him back to college, to lazy mornings with Jess and, before her, to a brief series of bright-eyed young men. 

Kevin slides out from under Sam and rolls them over, one leg draped across Sam’s hips.   Kevin’s skin is smooth where Sam’s hand comes to rest against the small of his back, and his roughly shaven face scratches against Sam’s cheek.  He scatters kisses across Sam’s face, one hand wandering downward.  Sam’s jeans are still on, itchy and unclean, but Kevin’s shed his, and he’s got nothing on but a pair of boxers and a t-shirt.  He presses his hand against Sam’s crotch, his fingers squeezing, playful and curious.

It feels like a dream, the kind that starts out happy and implausible, but inevitably takes a sharp left turn into screaming and death.  Kevin shifts to rest a little more on top of him, and his chest tightens with revulsion.  A switch flips in his brain, and he remembers what Kevin’s body felt like when it went limp under his hand and fell to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.  He remembers the feeling of a stranger touching him from the inside, the burning cold of an angel under his skin.  He remembers a little game Lucifer used to play:  wake up in a nice warm bed with someone you know—friend, lover, _family_ \--and then all sorts of interesting things happen.  Sam’s out of bed in an instant, shoving Kevin off him none-too-gently.  He shuts his eyes and tries to get his heartbeat under control. 

“You okay?” Kevin asks.  He sounds bewildered and a little hurt. 

“Sure, sure.”  Sam glances longingly at the bedroom door.  “I’m just . . . I’m just going to go take a shower.”  He leaves before Kevin answers.

He spends twenty minutes getting pummeled by the hot water.  His stomach is sour with the memory of things crawling around inside him, and his queasiness is twisted up with a sense of guilt.  He’s not sure now how he’d managed to convince himself that his longing to have an attractive young man sleep in his bed wasn’t sexual, but he feels like he preyed on Kevin’s crush, like he’s violated something he set out to protect.  And yet there’s a shameful, undeniable thrill at the memory of Kevin pinned beneath him, breathless and moaning under his mouth.  The water runs tepid, and all he’s sorted out is that he wants to bang his head against the tiles. 

He finds Kevin standing next to the coffeemaker, hands wrapped around an untouched mug, eyes resting everywhere but on Sam.  Sam pours coffee and settles against the counter, an appropriate two feet between them, and tries to think of words that won’t come.  There’s still time to put a stop to this, if not gracefully then at least with a certain heavy finality.  Sounding reasonable is always the last weapon in Sam’s arsenal; he can produce a passable imitation of rational thought long past the point he’s actually capable of it.  He has it in him to put on a reassuring, detached tone, make a quick speech that ends with one of several possible variations of, “I value our friendship,” and get the hell out of here for a couple of days until he’s gotten himself back under some sort of emotional control. 

“It’s okay,” Kevin says before Sam’s landed on anything, still not quite making eye contact.  “Really.  It’s not an after school special.  You’re excused from the very special talk.  We’re two screwed up people and I’ve been sleeping on your bed.” Kevin smiles a little.  “Sexy, screwed up people.  Something was going to happen sooner or later.  We can skip this and go straight to the part where we’re still friends.”

Sam doesn’t answer immediately.  He’s perversely disappointed.  As soon as he feels the door threaten to close on this possibility he wants to open it again, wishes he could double back to an hour ago and replay the morning so that it doesn’t end with him bolting.  Wishes he had any confidence it would happen differently if he tried it again. 

Kevin’s looking directly at him now, sizing him up like he sees him wavering.  “Or not.  Either way.  You just seemed pretty clear earlier.”

Sam shakes his head.  “I have a rough history, and sometimes it catches up with me.  Usually at the worst possible moment. I wasn’t running from _you_.”

“Oh,” Kevin says.  “ _Oh_.”  Sam sees him put it together, maybe a little more completely than Sam intended.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t know.”  He drops his gaze again and edges away from Sam like he’s giving him space. “Damn it.  I knew I shouldn’t have been there,” he says, more to himself than to Sam.

Sam feels his position as the grown up sliding out from under him.  He doesn’t want the sympathy of a nineteen year old virgin, doesn’t want to be something Kevin has to protect.  If anyone is the predatory asshole in this situation, it’s definitely Sam.

He steps back into Kevin’s space, closer than the appropriate two feet he’d kept before.  He can feel how much smaller Kevin is, barely standing past Sam’s shoulder.  Kevin has to tip his head up to look at him. 

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Sam says.  He cups Kevin’s face and his hand covers the side of his head.  This is easier than it was in bed.  “I wanted you there.”

“Good.”  Kevin swallows.  Sam kisses him with a force that slams him back against the counter.  Kevin manages to half-climb him before Sam lifts him off his feet entirely and pins him against the wall.  It’s a relief to feel that little body trapped under him, writhing and helpless, one thing that can’t disappear from his grasp or turn and hurt him.  Human contact that, at least for this one brief moment, he can control. 

Afterward Kevin is shyly affectionate, sitting on the counter as he pets Sam’s hair.  He brings his hand towards him from the front, the way you should approach a strange cat, like he still thinks there’s some chance Sam’s going to slap it away.  Sam rests his face against Kevin’s throat.  He feels quiet inside, satisfied, all the pieces of himself briefly knitted together.

They do it again before the end of the day.  Sam fucks Kevin over tables, against walls, on the floor of the library, on top of the sink, and once over a running washing machine. He picks him up and puts him where he wants him, holds him down one-handed and has his way with him.  

And yet if Kevin comes up behind Sam when he’s working at one of the library tables and leans down to kiss him, there’s a good chance he’ll go cold, repulsed at a visceral level.  It hadn’t been easy with Amelia, either, but he’s worse now, twitchy and resistant to anything sexual he doesn’t start. 

He tries to make it up to Kevin in other ways.  He makes an effort to acknowledge the work Kevin does, instead of just disappearing into the stacks for days at a time or tossing down books in front of him without a word.  At first Kevin looks suspicious when Sam compliments his research, or even says “thank you,” like he thinks it’s flattery.  But when he allows himself to believe it he flushes and smiles with a fizzy, half-embarrassed pride that makes Sam want to say nice things to him all day long.  He’s never been one for dirty talk, but if he thought he could get away with praising Kevin’s understanding of Etruscan curses during sex, he’d be tempted.   

He can usually handle cuddling, and Kevin enjoys curling up next to him, a satisfyingly small weight burrowed against his side.  Kevin can still get happy in a way Sam had almost forgotten people do, simple and firecracker bright, and for reasons Sam appreciates but doesn’t fully understand, just lying in bed together can be enough to bring it on.

“What color are your eyes?” Kevin says, peering up out of his position in the crook of Sam’s arm.

“Hazel.”

“Nope,” Kevin says with great authority and a barely repressed smile.

Sam smiles back in spite of himself.  “’Nope’?”  I think I know what color my eyes are.”

“Apparently not.”  Kevin straddles Sam’s lap and makes a show of leaning in to inspect Sam’s eyes. “Green, blue, brown . . .” he leans in farther, until Sam feels the flutter of his eyelashes,  “. . . little bit of gold.  You’ve got a whole kaleidoscope going on in there.”

Jess had been fascinated by his eyes too when they’d first fallen in love, insisting she could see sunflowers in them.  Kevin’s the same age now that she was then.  Suddenly Sam’s uncomfortable with all the deep eye contact.  He’s lived so many lifetimes since Jess, and he’s afraid of what Kevin might find if he looks too long.  He pulls away slightly and drops his gaze to the bedspread. 

Kevin senses his shift in mood.  “Anyway,” he says under his breath, and slips off Sam’s lap, settling next to him on the bed looking deflated.  Sam wraps an arm around him, wishing he had it in him to play along with him more often.  But his affection has too little lightness in it.  When he’s hit with a wave of tenderness it doesn’t make him want to tease Kevin about his beautiful eyes, it makes him want crush the boy to his chest like Lennie with the bunny, repeating _don’t die_ until saying it makes it true.  If he weren’t so sure it would scare the hell out him, he’d be doing it right now.

 

**VI.**

The sex is mostly disappointing.  You wouldn’t think that getting thrown over tables and slammed into walls could be boring, but it’s like getting hit with the same sexual sledgehammer every time, and Kevin gets tired of it pretty quickly.  Sure, Sam can pick him up off his feet, but so can every other guy he’s had to deal with for the past three years.  His life hasn’t exactly lacked for big men manhandling him.  Show him a guy who _can’t_ push him around, then maybe he’d be impressed.

Kevin suspects Sam doesn’t know his own strength, or else is convinced Kevin’s a lot sturdier than he is.  Practically every time they fuck Kevin’s elbow ends up banging off a wall, or his knees get bruised on the hardwood floor, or Sam folds him up into some unlikely pretzel shape he’s just not flexible enough to manage.  Kevin’s pretty sure God never meant his knees to touch his chest. 

His fantasies of jumping Sam for sweaty gym sex pretty much always ended with Kevin topping, and he’s privately annoyed Sam didn’t ask for his opinion before deciding he was the designated bottom.  He’d be fine with doing it sometimes, it _does_  feel good, but Sam pounds him like he’s hammering a nail with his dick, and there are things Kevin enjoys more that don’t make it impossible to sit the next day. 

Kevin tries to nudge them delicately toward sex that might be more fun for him, gently kissing Sam’s neck when they’re curled up in bed or crawling into his lap in the library, flirtatious and playful, but his efforts mostly meet with failure.  Sam freezes under his touch, suddenly awkward and distant, or else he seizes control and does what he always does.  Kevin swallows his complaints, even if a couple of times he has to walk off as soon as they finish because he’s flush with frustration, and he knows if he sticks around long enough to cuddle he’ll say something about Sam’s sexual skills that he’ll regret. 

Sam’s never given him a PowerPoint presentation, but Kevin gets all too clearly that he was raped, maybe subjected to even worse violations, and that it makes sex hard for him.  Kevin’s overwhelmed by the sheer, grim mass of all the half-glimpsed horrors Sam’s been through, and in their shadow his own sexual concerns seem trivial.  Compared to the grand weight of tragedy Sam carries on his shoulders it feels petty for Kevin to object because there’s a doorknob jabbing him in the back. 

Even if he wanted to say something, he’s not sure who he’d take it up with.  The fierce, wordless Sam who throws him over tables?  The brittle, rawboned Sam who lies with his head in Kevin’s lap in the middle of the night, his hand on Kevin’s leg a little thinner each time?  The cold, efficient Sam who tears through the library during the day, and hardly notices Kevin exists?  The soft, affectionate Sam who flickers in and out of being erratically, making pancakes and smiling like a boyfriend before he disappears?  They’re all too fragile and elusive for a conversation that blunt.

There’s a charm to how changeable Sam is, a challenge in never knowing which version he’ll get or when it might slide almost imperceptibly into another.  Sam may not have spoken a single sentence that didn’t include the word “demon” in sixteen hours, but he melts from a driven automaton into human warmth when Kevin makes him a mediocre stir fry.  The first time Kevin cooks for him almost offhandedly, because that’s what people who care about each other do, the same way he used to leave dinner in the oven for his mom when she worked late.  But Sam is touchingly, disproportionately moved when Kevin brings a plate out to the library, his face breaking into a rare, incredulous smile.  He refuses to eat over his books, carrying the plate into the dining room and insisting they have dinner together.  He oohs and ahhs over the unimpressive food to a degree Kevin would be pretty sure was bullshit from anyone else, but Sam’s delight is heartbreakingly sincere.  Kevin grins and blushes like he’s on a first date, stumbling over words and shyly touching Sam’s hand. 

Kevin spends a lot of his time feeling like he’s running ten steps behind Sam, so it’s flattering to discover he wields this small but crucial power over him.  He makes a point of cooking after that, running through the handful of meals he learned in high school and then hunting through the internet for recipes. Sam is happy no matter what he makes, or how badly it turns out, and never seems bothered that it’s vegetarian.  But he remains indifferent to food when Kevin doesn’t feed him, and Kevin suspects when he goes out on hunts he barely eats at all. He gets thinner as the months pass, as if his drive to find Dean were burning him down to his core.  Kevin plies him with cream soups and eggplant parmesan, whatever he can come up with to keep him from fading away entirely.  Sam eats it all gratefully, but worry still wears away at him until he’s lanky and pale.

The occasional nights when Sam tears himself away from his books to watch TV with Kevin are precious and unpredictable, a treat too rare to take for granted.  Kevin’s allowed to get under the blankets now, and he finds comfort in curling up against Sam’s chest, the heavy weight of Sam’s hand against his back.  He runs his fingers through Sam’s hair, oblivious to the murmur from the screen. He likes to catch Sam’s hand in his own and play with it.  It dwarfs Kevin’s when he holds them up against each other, rough and calloused where Kevin’s is soft and unused.  The knuckles are broad and beautiful, and he finds a quiet contentment in running his fingers across them.  Sometimes, huddled in the warm curve of Sam’s body, he gets the wistful feeling that he’s remembering a happy moment instead of living in it.  It reminds him of the sharp, irresistible pangs of nostalgia he’d felt as a ghost when he’d tried to wander too far from his father’s ring, a jagged yearning hooked into the meat of his heart.

There’s no news of Dean, or none that Sam cares to share with the class, but he still finds reasons to leave.  He claims it’s about his brother—yada, yada, demon—but Kevin knows better.  Sam likes to hunt, and so he does.  Sometimes, when Sam comes limping home, Kevin’s tempted to ask dryly whether he unearthed any valuable information, but Sam always looks so exhausted that sarcasm seems wasted.

Kevin’s not sure what to do with the long days alone.  At first he earnestly continues his hunt for information about Dean, but months have passed and he’s read through every promising book in the library.  He’s beginning to doubt there’s any truth to be found.  Maybe Dean is just lost to them, the way the Winchesters once claimed his mother was.  He’d gladly bust his ass if there were any chance it’d matter, but there are seven billion people on earth, and Dean has a lifetime of training behind him if he wants to pull a disappearing act.  Assuming, of course, that whatever’s running around in Dean’s skin bears any relationship to the man who died. 

Kevin misses Dean more than ever these days, as if his brain has only now caught up to the fact that Dean’s dead.  The guy was kind of a dick sometimes, but he was big in every way that mattered, his voice filling the bunker with bad jokes and loud soliloquies, making it feel warm and lived in.  Sam couldn’t possibly care less about Star Trek, no matter how indulgently he sits through the episodes with Kevin, but Dean would’ve had an opinion about whether Kirk or Picard was a better captain, and he would’ve been delighted to argue about it.  They’ll never have that conversation now.  Kevin hates that he came back so soon after Dean died.  Why couldn’t it have been a few days earlier?  He would’ve liked to see the guy one last time.  Dean was a drama queen, but his guilt over Kevin’s death was real, or as real as Winchester guilt ever is, and it would’ve been nice if he’d gotten the chance to see that Kevin was okay.          

Stranded in the library without any leads worth following, Kevin plays jazz records and dances alone.  He’d never heard music like this before he found it in the bunker, and the people he’s talked to about it online have taught him to conceive of it as the epitome of cool.  He stays away from pills and whiskey because he’s promised himself he won’t entirely trash the new body he’s been given, but he finds a wine cellar down in the basement, and he figures that’s close enough to okay that he can get away with drinking it.  It tastes better than whiskey, anyway. 

On the days Sam is gone, he starts drinking around noon and nurses the bottle steadily until it puts him to sleep behind some dim bookshelf in the evening.  He researches the vintage wines he finds, and ends up making friends with a bunch of middle aged connoisseurs who can’t believe he’s dug up bottles thought to be 50 years gone, and who don’t understand how it’s possible he doesn’t know what he’s got.  He tells them the same thing he tells the jazz collectors who marvel over his out-of-print records:  he’s got a wealthy, older boyfriend who travels a lot for work, and all the weird, implausibly valuable stuff Kevin talks about belongs to him.  It’s true, or true enough as makes no difference.

He still talks to his mother every day, although he ran out of things to say to her months ago.  He hadn’t really sorted out his sexuality before he got hit with prophet lightning, and he’d never gotten around to mentioning to her that he had confusing feelings for boys.  He’s pretty sure she’ll be cool about it—she has gay friends, and he figures having been dead gets him a free pass from her for the next year or two, anyway. 

What she definitely wouldn’t be cool about, though, is the news that her hot mess of a teenage son is carrying on an affair with a screwed up guy in his thirties.  She’d be down here in a heartbeat, trying to drag him out of the bunker by the ear.  He doesn’t want to deal with that, so he doesn’t talk about it, even though it’s all that’s on his mind.  He wishes he could.  They’re close in the way an only child can be with a single mother, friends as much as family, and it would be a relief to spill his guts to her.  He wants someone to listen to him sympathetically while he picks apart his sexuality, trying to figure out if he’s gay or bisexual, or whatever the hell the other options are.  He wants an advisor to help him analyze Sam’s behavior:  what it meant when he smiled, what it meant when he didn’t, why he might have chosen one particular word and not another.

He calls her when he’s on his walk in the woods outside around the bunker, just at sunset, when she’s getting off work.  By 6pm he’s halfway through a 1955 bottle of burgundy, his cheeks flush with the warmth of the wine in the chilly evening air. The final traces of summer have seeped away in the last couple of weeks, fading the edges of the leaves from green to red. 

“Have you thought about what you’re going to do next?” she asks.  She started asking him that question six weeks after he crawled out of the ash pile.  Whenever she repeats it some part of him wants to tell her to give him some goddamn space, but he never does.   He knows she’s just worried.  She wants to fast forward to the part where he decides he’s okay and goes back to being the perfect son he was before things got weird.

“I will,” he says, “I promise.  But right now I need to help Sam look for Dean.”  He’s pretty much written off their search as a fool’s errand, but she doesn’t need to know that.  He doesn’t mention that when he checked his application status yesterday he found out he’d gotten in to the shitty Parisian college.  She’d never rest until he agreed to go, and he’s not willing to leave Sam right now.  His daydreams about Paris are shaded by Sam’s absence from them, an aching sense of loss and a whisper of guilty relief.

He gets back to the bunker just after dark.  He’s five steps into the entryway when he’s tackled, a hand grabbing his arm, his back slammed against the railing. 

“Where were you?” Sam demands.  He looks like the world is ending.

“I don’t know,” Kevin says automatically, because he feels like he’s suddenly staring into the glaring light of an interrogation lamp, and he’s too startled too remember.  And then, “On a walk.  I didn’t know you were coming home.  The hell happened to you?” His right arm is in a sling.  They’ve talked on the phone several times, but Sam never mentioned an injury.

Sam lets him go and steps back, rubbing his good hand over his face.  “Sorry,” he says.  “I got back, and I couldn’t find you, and I thought . . . sorry.”  He pats Kevin’s arm where he grabbed it.

“What happened?” Kevin asks again. 

Sam looks down at his arm like he’s just noticing he’s hurt.  “Demons.  Turned out they were faster than Cas.”

“I bet,” Kevin says.  He doesn’t like the thought of Sam out there alone with Castiel.  Dean told him once, not long after they met, that angels couldn’t feel love or compassion the way people do.  He’s never seen anything that made him doubt Dean’s opinion.  It’s obvious Sam considers Castiel a friend, and loves him with all his big, human heart.  It reminds Kevin of the kind of people who befriend bears in the Alaskan wilderness, only to get tragically but predictably eaten.

“He tried his best,” Sam says.  “Come on, let me make you dinner.”

“I can . . . “ Kevin starts, but the look on Sam’s face stops him.  He can see Sam needs to do something productive, so he just nods.  Sam makes spaghetti with mushrooms while Kevin sits at the kitchen table and watches him.  His motions are quick and fluid, even with his dominant hand out of commission.  They kill the bottle of burgundy as they eat, each one avoiding any topic that might require a detailed description of what he did while they were apart.  Afterward Sam fucks him against the kitchen counter, holding him up on his toes with his left hand, and all Kevin can think is, “Thank God he’s strong enough to do this one-handed.  Maybe he won’t die when he goes out on his next hunt.”

That night Kevin struggles with his breathing for the first time in weeks.  He wakes up at 2am, nestled in the crook of Sam’s good arm, terrified that his body is going to decide to stop drawing air into his lungs.  He can’t trust his autonomic nervous system; it might forget he’s supposed to be alive, it might give up on him without asking.  He feels every inch of dirt the bunker’s buried under pressing down on top of his chest, smothering him.

Sam stirs against his rigid body.  “What’s wrong?” he mutters, half asleep. 

“I can’t breathe,” Kevin chokes out between gasps.  “There’s no air left.”  He feels Sam jerk awake behind him. 

“Yes,” Sam says, and shifts to spoon him, the sprained arm carefully rested against his shoulder.  “Yes, you can.  There’s plenty of air.  You can feel me breathing, right?  Breathe with me.”  Kevin feels the steady rise and fall of Sam’s chest, and how it contrasts with the trapped rabbit rhythm of his own breathing.  He does his best to match Sam, but he feels lightheaded and dizzy.

“There you go,” Sam murmurs in his ear, “you’re doing really good.”  There’s a silence where all Kevin hears is the frantic rustle of his own breathing, and then Sam says, “You know, I hyperventilated once myself.  You’d think it would be a hunt or something, but no.  I was supposed to be the star of my high school play, but they had to put me on tech because I’m terrified of public speaking and I . . . “  It’s a long, rambling, reassuring story, and Kevin half-listens to it while he struggles in the dark.

When he wakes up again the clock beside the bed tells him it’s morning.  Sam’s awake, and he’s watching Kevin’s face, waiting to see if he’s all right. 

“Good morning,” Kevin says, and Sam gives a small smile, still cautious.  Kevin runs his fingers through the ridiculous palm tree Sam’s hair shaped itself into while he slept, and Sam’s smile broadens.  They kiss, soft and drowsy.  Sam’s t-shirt is sleep-soft and warm under Kevin’s hands, and his stubble is scratchy and familiar.  They kiss lazily, in fits and starts, murmuring to each other about nothing in particular.  Kevin imagines taking Sam with him to Paris, the two of them waking up in a bedroom with windows that let in the morning light, eating croissants and drinking wine in tiny cafes, Sam going off to do something with his day that doesn’t put his arm in a sling.

Sam’s kissing his neck when Kevin hears himself say, “Do you ever think about the future?” 

Sam looks up, bemused.  “The future?”

“What you want to do with your life?”  He doesn’t add, ‘. . . once you accept Dean’s not coming back,’ but he realizes how loud the implication is as soon as the words are out of his mouth.  He keeps talking to cover it up: “Money’s not a problem, right?  You’ve got a half dozen vintage cars in mint condition.  If you figure they’re forty grand a piece, that’s almost a quarter of a million dollars right there.”  He doesn’t mention he’s done enough research to know that’s a conservative estimate.  He’s not inclined to admit how much time he’s spent liquidating Sam’s property in his head.  “And I’ve got a pretty good college fund.   We’d have enough to live on for a while, even if we both went to school.”

Sam shakes his head.  “Kevin . . .”  He sits up, smoothing his clothes into place.  “I want that for you.  More than anything.  But I need to find Dean, and even if I didn’t, I’m not . . . I’ve tried the apple pie life, and it never sticks. You can’t wait on me.” He lays his hand on Kevin’s head for a moment, and then gets up and walks out. 

Sam’s uncharacteristically attentive for the next two days, setting aside his pointless, repetitive research to cook, talk, and watch movies, doing his best to act warm and cheerful, like he’s offering a consolation prize for being too fucked up to live a normal life.  The whole performance is really fucking sad, but Kevin kind of enjoys the attention anyway.  On the third day Sam gets a call about ‘mutter, mutter, demons,’ and takes off again. 

It seems like a normal hunt for the first couple of days, but then Sam’s phone starts going straight to voicemail.  Kevin doesn’t hear from him for a week.  Maybe he was eaten by monsters.  Maybe he fell asleep driving eighty miles an hour on the highway and crashed into a tree.  Maybe he jumped off a bridge.  Or maybe Kevin spooked him by talking about the future, and he decided to pull a disappearing act, without even the decency of sending a text to say, “Hey, not dead, just afraid of commitment. Ttyl.”  It wouldn’t be the first time he’d stopped taking Kevin’s calls.

On the eighth day, Kevin rifles through Sam’s bedroom looking for contact numbers.  The Winchesters constantly have hunter friends dropping into their lives from out of the sky.  There must be someone Kevin can send to look for Sam, someone capable of figuring out if he’s dead, chained up in a torture chamber, or just dumping Kevin in the most passive-aggressive way possible.  Seriously, even Dean’s corpse left a note.    

He doesn’t find anything useful, and he’s on the brink of taking one of the vintage cars, praying he can figure out a stick shift, and looking for Sam himself, when his phone lights up with Sam’s number.   
  
Kevin’s hands shake as he answers the phone.  “The fuck happened to you?  I thought you were dead.”

“I had a run-in with Crowley.  I’ve been using a burner phone so he wouldn’t hear you calling me and figure out you’re alive.”  Sam’s voice is thick and sluggish with exhaustion.

“Oh,” Kevin says, and feels ashamed he was ever suspicious.  “That was smart.  Are you okay?”

Sam takes a deep breath.  “I found Dean.” 

“Alive?  He’s all right?”  From Sam’s tone Kevin gets the feeling he might mean he found Dean’s body.

“He was a demon, but it’s all good now.”  The words are over-enunciated, and yet still slur slightly into each other at the edges. 

“Are you drunk?”  Kevin’s never seen Sam have more than two drinks before.  He’d been too driven on his search for Dean to let himself go like that. 

“You bet.  Half a fifth of Jack.  Dean tried to bash my head in with a hammer.  Cas stopped him, though.  See?  He’s a good friend.  And you never trusted him.”    

“Um,” Kevin says.  He’s not sure what to do with any of this information.  “Is Dean there right now?  Could you--“ The line goes dead before Kevin can say, “—put him on?”  Kevin tries to call Sam back, but he doesn’t pick up. 

Dean’s alive.  But somehow Kevin doesn’t feel like celebrating.     

 

**VII.**

“If I’d known the kid swung that way I’d have pointed him toward a different bar in Branson.”  Dean’s tapping his fingers on the wheel of the Impala, newly restored to gleaming perfection.  The first thing Dean did after he shook off the black eyes was to put the car back in peak running order.  Sam has the feeling it was as much for his benefit as Dean’s, an unspoken argument for a return to normalcy.  If the Impala is set to rights then Dean must be too, in spite of the Mark of Cain still itching raw and red on his arm.

Sam knows he should be happy right now, but he’s poured all his energy into this search for so many months that all he can feel is tired.  And it’s still not over.  He knows now he’ll never really get Dean back until he’s gotten rid of the Mark, and it’s like climbing to the top of a mountain only to see a dozen more looming in the distance. 

“See, that’s the kind of thing I _don’t_  want you to say when you see him,” he tells Dean.  It seemed like a good idea to have this out before they got back to the bunker.  Dean knows him too well for him to hide it, even if he wanted to, and trying would only make it look like he’s ashamed.  Which he’s not.  No matter how uncomfortable it makes him to explain that he’s sleeping with a teenager.  “He’s been through a lot, and he doesn’t need you teasing him.  You think you’re cute, but you’re not.”

“I’m freaking adorable, and you know it.”  Dean’s grin is familiar, but thinner at the edges than it used to be.  He holds up his hand before Sam can say anything else.  “Relax, Humbert Humbert.  I won’t say anything in front of him.  I’m just happy he’s okay.”

Whatever else Dean may still be hiding, that’s the truth.  When Kevin meets them on the landing of the bunker, Dean hugs him so hard he lifts him off his feet while Kevin laughs, giddy with the simple joy of seeing someone he thought was gone forever.  This is what a reunion looks like when nobody’s psychotically violent or naked and feral, and Sam smiles as he watches it.

That night in bed, after the hugging, and the beer, and the pizza, Kevin’s subdued, all the enthusiasm he showed in front of Dean drained away. 

“Are you okay?” he says finally. 

“Yeah, of course.”  It’s more a reflex than an answer.

“Just, you seem kind of low,” Kevin insists.  “I figured you’d be over the moon.”  Kevin doesn’t mention the part where Sam drunk dialed him to talk about his brother trying bash in his skull, but Sam figures that’s implied.

“I am.”  Kevin’s look calls bullshit.  “Really.  But he’s still got the Mark.  I’ve got a lot of work left to do.” 

“Jesus Christ!”  Sam’s startled by the heat in Kevin’s voice.  “I thought it was over.  He just got here tonight and you’re already on about the Mark?  How much fucking longer is this all going to take?” 

“What do you want me tell you, Kevin?”  Sam’s barely slept in three days, and he’s asked himself the same question too many times to want to hear it from someone else.  “It wasn’t my idea for Dean to run off and get himself branded.  This is what I’m stuck with.”

Kevin rolls onto his back and looks up at the ceiling.  “I know, I know, okay?  I’m not saying it’s your fault.  I’m just saying, I thought this was what we were working toward.  The big, important _thing_  that needed to happen.  And now it’s happened but nothing’s changed.”  He glances over at Sam.  “When will it be okay?”   

Sam’s pretty sure the honest answer to that question is ‘never,’ at least for himself.  There’ll always be a next thing—another fight, another quest.  Even when he’s dead there’s more to do.  But he can’t say that, so instead he says, “I don’t know.”

Kevin sighs.  “Okay.”  Sam’s not sure what Kevin’s accepting. He rolls away and pretends to be asleep, so Sam doesn’t get the chance to ask.

Kevin is cheerful and supportive with Dean in the days that follow, distracting him from his enforced vacation with computer games and arguments about the plausibility of the time travel in Star Trek IV.  Around Sam, though, he’s moody.  Not so much angry as sullen and cold.  He answers Sam with sighs and monosyllables more often than sentences, dropping books too roughly and rattling dishes too hard. 

It’s childish, and Sam has no patience for it, especially since as far as he can tell Kevin’s pissed at him for not being able to single-handedly fix all their problems overnight.  He pretends not to notice, and ignores all the wordless invitations to fight.

But then in the middle of a day of quiet hostility he’ll come up behind Sam while he’s reading and wrap his arms around Sam’s chest. He stands there with his cheek resting against Sam’s hair for a minute, and then walks away.  For two nights running he disappears into his own bedroom to sleep, and on the third crawls into Sam’s bed and spends the whole night clinging to him.  The next day he’s as distant as ever. 

After a week Kevin wakes up one morning, and the mood has passed.  He’s gentle and obliging all day.  He volunteers to help research a case and then sits too close to Sam at the table, bumping elbows and digging his fingers into the fabric of Sam’s shirt.  Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon Kevin disappears under the table.  He peers up with an unspoken question.  Sam can’t always handle even this.  Sam smiles.  They haven’t done anything since Sam brought Dean home, and he figures it for makeup sex.  Kevin stays on his knees for a while afterward, leaning against Sam’s leg while Sam runs his finger through his hair.

Kevin makes eggplant parmesan that night.  Dean’s gone into town for obscure reasons, and Sam figures Kevin told him to get the hell out for a couple of hours.  Sam’s not allowed to help with the food, so he sits at the kitchen table and watches instead.  Growing up he’d always liked being in the homes of his classmates while their parents were making dinner, the same way that later he’d found happiness in Jess baking cookies, Amelia making spaghetti, or even Dean grilling burgers on the stove.  Seeing Kevin chop vegetables makes him feel like he’s part of something solid and ordinary he’s usually outside of. 

Once the food is made, though, Kevin sits across the table in anxious silence.  “What’s wrong?”  Sam says after several minutes of watching Kevin push eggplant around his plate.

Kevin’s mouth works silently for a moment, and then he blurts out, “I’m going to school.  In France.  In three weeks.”

It’s such a bizarrely unexpected series of words that Sam can’t think of any response more appropriate than, “What?”

“I faked a history and got accepted by a college in Paris.  I told them yes a while ago, but I wasn’t really going to go.”  His tone lands somewhere between apologetic and defensive.  “But now that you’ve found Dean, it seems like the right time.”

The past week suddenly comes into focus.  Kevin clinging to him in bed, Kevin under the library table:  those were last times.  He wishes he’d known that while they were happening.  The lump in his throat catches him off-guard.  He swallows it and says what a decent person would say to a kid who got into college.

“That’s great.  I’m proud of you.”

Kevin’s smile is watery.  “I stole a social security number and invented my school records.  I’m not sure ‘proud’ is the right word.  But thanks.”

“No, it is.  It takes a lot of courage to go back out there after what you’ve been through.  I want this for you.”  And he does, he really does.  He just dreads the antiseptic loneliness of his perfectly warded bedroom once Kevin’s not inside it.  “Have you told your mom?”

“Yeah, she’s thrilled.  She’s wanted this since I washed the ash off.  And it’s far enough away from anywhere I used to hang out that she can risk visiting occasionally.  Not just phone calls.”  He lays his hand over Sam’s.  “I’d ask you to come with me, but we both know you never would.”

“No,” Sam agrees.  Not even if Dean were cured.  Every attempt at normal has failed, from Stanford to Amelia.  He can’t imagine any future where he moves into a Paris flat and studies classical languages that doesn’t end in disaster.  Kevin nods, but he looks disappointed, like maybe in spite of what he’d said he’d been hoping for a different answer.          

Kevin sleeps in his own bed that night, and all the nights after.  Sam lies awake and worries the universe is devising new ways to kill Dean off.  He worries the Mark will turn Dean into the kind of monster who slips through devil’s traps and past sigils, and one night he’ll walk straight into Sam’s bedroom and slam a cleaver into his throat.  He worries neither of those things will happen, and the Mark will stay, year after year, gradually shredding away flakes of his brother until there’s nothing left that’s recognizable as Dean.

There’s a cold spot in the sheets just beyond the edge of his body where Kevin should be sprawled face down, taking up two-thirds of the mattress, all greedy limbs and warm skin.  Sam knows that having Kevin back in his bed wouldn’t change anything that matters, wouldn’t heal Dean or find Cas’s grace, wouldn’t make any of them any safer.  But it feels like it would set the whole world right.  He rolls over in the night to spoon someone who isn’t there, and it’s almost embarrassing how much it hurts.  He’s been through so much worse, every single person he knows has been through so much worse, but it turns out getting dumped is exactly as painful, whether or not you’ve been to Hell.

He hides it as best he can.  Kevin’s doing the right thing, and he doesn’t deserve to have Sam drop a burden of guilt on his back to carry with him to France.  He acts enthusiastic and supportive, although it’s probably for the best that Dean makes it his business to get Kevin the fake passport, the plane ticket, and a new set of clothes. For more than one reason.  Sam catches Kevin looking longingly at him from across the library more than once, sees him stop himself halfway to taking Sam’s hand or kissing him in the morning.  It would be easy to fall back into old habits, easy to convince him to stay, at least for a few more months.  He avoids situations where they’d be alone together.  He does his research on demonic markings sitting on the floor in the back rooms, and slips out of the kitchen when he finds Kevin drinking wine there over his laptop.

Dean makes a pointedly casual offer to drive Kevin to the Kansas City airport.  “There’s a great pie joint on the west side of the city I wouldn’t mind hitting up.  No reason we both need to go.” 

But there _is_ , of course.  Sam doesn’t want to imply that he’s bitter by ditching out on the airport, doesn’t want his failure to say goodbye to be Kevin’s last impression of him.  More than that, he needs to see Kevin get on the plane.  If he just disappeared from the bunker it would be too much like he was never there, a ghost who receded at sunrise.

Kevin hasn’t talked to Sam much about his plans over the last three weeks—they haven’t talked much about anything, since every attempt to imitate friendly conversation lands somewhere between painfully awkward and awkwardly painful—but in the car he doesn’t seem able to hold back, and chatters the entire way about where he’s going to live, what classes he wants to take, and the places he’ll visit on break.  Sam’s a little hurt that Kevin kept his college application a secret for the entire time they were together, that he’d been so sure he couldn’t trust Sam to support him.  But he finds it comforting to hear these little details now, even if it’s too late to help with any of them. It’s easier to let Kevin go if Sam can picture him headed toward a specific place where he’ll be happy, instead of just a blank spot on the map.

Sam gives Kevin a quick, one-armed hug when they reach security screening.  He waits for Kevin to walk away, but he stays rooted to the spot.

“Maybe this was a bad idea.”  Kevin suddenly looks wide-eyed and panicky.  “I’m not sure I want to do this.”

Sam sighs.  “I am.  You’ve been planning this for months.  You were so excited the entire way here.”

“I don’t know anyone there.  The dorms aren’t warded.  I’ve never even been on a plane before.”  Kevin’s voice rises with each sentence.  “This is stupid.”

Sam can remember feeling like this his first week at Stanford.  He’d hated that he couldn’t lay down salt in his dorm room too.

“Look, if you get there, and you give it a chance, and you’re miserable, you can always come back and stay with us. But if you don’t get on that plane you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

“I know,” Kevin says quietly.  “I know, I know.  You’re going to come visit me though, right?  Sometime soon?”

“Sure.” Sam’s pretty sure Kevin will be significantly less interested in seeing him after his first week.

“Don’t give me ‘sure.’” Kevin mimics Sam’s attempt at a casual delivery.  “I know that means you’re planning to blow it off.  Actually come.”

“I’ve got a lot I’m dealing with right now.  But if it’s humanly possible to get away, I’ll visit you your first semester.” Kevin nods, satisfied.  “Now get out of here before you miss your flight.”

Kevin hugs him properly this time, and pulls a sheet of notebook paper out of his bag.  “I’m not saying you should do anything with this.  I’m just saying I did the work, so you might as well have it.”  He walks away before Sam can answer.  Sam watches him until he disappears behind the rows of metal detectors, but he doesn’t turn around.

Sam looks at the paper.  It’s a hypothetical liquidation of the bunker’s non-supernatural assets.  There are price listings not only for the cars, but for antique furniture, illuminated manuscripts, and sixty-year-old bottles of wine.  At the bottom a bewilderingly large number has been circled several times.  Sam’s first thought is that it was a colossal waste of time, and he almost throws it in the garbage can in front of the airport.  But it was a gift, after all, and throwing it away would be ungracious, so he slips it into his pocket instead.


End file.
